Drive for life ... the Zaporozhets car, dull but durable. Photograph: Rizzoli

When it comes to design from the cold war era, you picture a world populated by cliches. On one side of the Iron Curtain, there's the sex appeal of American consumer goods – Raymond Loewy's curvaceous fridges and Harley Earl's tail-finned automobiles gleaming under their polish. On the other, you have the drab world of Soviet consumer goods, all muddy hues, clunkiness and hard angles. Was Soviet product design really so bad? Perhaps. And yet, writes Michael Idov in the introduction to Made in Russia: Unsung Icons of Soviet Design, "To live in the Soviet Union was not to be ignorant of good design. It was to be obsessively, erotically hyperaware of it."

Two points are being made here. The first is simply that in a market starved of decent goods, quality jumped out. But the insinuation is also that communism didn't suppress desire, and that is the reason it failed to triumph over capitalism. With hindsight, we know that Richard Nixon was on to a winner when he challenged Nikita Khruschev at the infamous Kitchen Debate in 1959 with the question: "Would it not be better to compete in the relative merit of washing machines than in the strength of rockets?" It has become a kind of truism that washing machines – and fridges, Tupperware, cars and electric guitars – are what won the cold war. But it seems enough water has flowed under the bridge to merit a touch of revisionism, not to say nostalgia.

Too hot to handle? ... boiling wand

Not all of the 50 objects Idov has catalogued in Made in Russia are great designs – in fact, very few are – but they have an endearing charm now that no one is forced to live with them. There's the reflector electrical heater, a mini satellite dish with a scarcely protected filament that was only so-so at warming you up, but highly effective at starting fires. In a similar vein, the boiling wand was a traveller's kettle that you put into water instead of the other way round: it made a mean cuppa and could black out an entire city block. Then there are objects at once familiar and alien, such as the diplomatic telephone with no dial, like a face with no features ("unheimlich", Freud would call it: uncanny). Another is the Tonika electric guitar, strangely amoeboid and famously unplayable.

Perhaps a truer depiction of Soviet design, however, is not the comedy of errors described above but a weird mirror image of the west. When Khruschev dismissed American domestic superiority at the Kitchen Debate, the irony was that the only templates trusted by the Russian authorities when it came to design were western ones. Soviet design was a world of reverse-engineered knock-offs. The most notorious case is the Vyatka scooter, an ersatz Vespa, which even borrowed the same font for its logo. Similarly, the Vesna portable cassette player imitated Japanese models, while the Elektronika handheld video game was a rip-off of Nintendo's Game and Watch console – although Idov reminds us that the Soviets did give us Tetris.

What went wrong for Soviet design? It started so promisingly. In the two decades after the Bolshevik revolution the constructivists were reimagining almost every aspect of daily life, from clothing to architecture. What spelled the end of design after the second world war – ironically, just as American consumer culture was coming into its own – was the entrenchment of a bureaucratic cadre. And here there is a backstory to Made in Russia that Idov only hints at. Imagine a system in which nothing could be released on the market without the stamp of the VNIITE, the Soviet industrial design institute. And imagine if the VNIITE's method of certifying a design was to compare it with its closest western counterpart. Suddenly, all that flagrant copying makes sense. Originality was discouraged; the bureaucrats had no way to judge it. Somewhere in the VNIITE archives there may just be a parallel world of Soviet design that exists only on paper. I, for one, would love to see it.

Of course, there was another essential flaw in the USSR's design ambitions: the lack of competition. Where was the incentive for a company to improve a product when there was no alternative for consumers to turn to? At the same time, if you'd just reached the end of a six-month waiting list for a fridge, or a 10-year waiting list for a Zaporozhets car, you'd be so happy to finally have one that your critical faculties might not be at their sharpest.

There were some genuinely classic designs, though. The Lomo camera, with its super-saturated film, is still hugely popular in an otherwise digital world. The avos shopping bag, essentially a string vest with handles, was ubiquitous and remains far preferable to plastic bags, just as the collapsible portable cup is preferable to millions of plastic and polystyrene ones. The ribbed drinking glass, meanwhile, and the Saturna and Raketa vacuum cleaners, simply lasted for ever. We may mock Soviet design, but there are lessons to heed from it. Durability, for one. In our disposable culture, rapid replacement cycles have almost inured us to the idea that nothing lasts. Such is the price, apparently, of free enterprise and consumer choice.

As it happens, I was in Moscow last week, and I wondered whether the arrival of capitalism had solved all these problems. I dropped in on the Art Lebedev Studio, Russia's largest design agency with a staff of 200, and spoke to one of its art directors, Timur Burbayev. While the situation has improved, he says, the problem is education. Many of the teachers at the design schools are relics of the Soviet era, with no practical experience of design in the real world and no connections to the industry. "At the Stroganoff University, the first project they set the students is to design something in the style of Russian constructivism," says Burbayev.

However, one thing has changed: designers can now take power into their own hands. Burbayev gave me two incredible examples. In 2007 the Russian central bank held a competition to design a symbol for the ruble, which has never had one. Instead of waiting for the government to choose, 26 of the best design firms in Russia chose a design among themselves, and agreed to make it a contractual obligation to use it as the symbol for the ruble in their work. It is now the de facto symbol for the currency, even though the government has never authorised it. Similarly, frustrated by the state of the Moscow subway map, which is ungainly and out-of-date (13 new stops have opened since it was designed), the Art Lebedev Studio created its own, and provided a free downloadable version to anyone who wanted to publish it. Consequently, it now appears in all kinds of guidebooks; but when metro staff are asked for a copy they are completely nonplussed. Which must be rather satisfying for the rebel designers. Where the bureaucrats once held an omnipotent grip on design, designers of the post-Soviet era have learned to turn the tables on them. From which we can conclude one of two things: either getting things done in new Russia means resorting to piratical tactics, or, with a free market and the internet, good design is just difficult to keep down.